Coca-Cola’s New Bottle Is Made of Ice

Good news for those of you who enjoy a nice cold Coke: the company has rolled out a new bottle made entirely from frozen water. Bad news for those of you who don’t live in Colombia: It’s only available in Colombia.

This icy new drinking vessel is shaped like the traditional glass Coke bottle and has the company’s name etched into the ice, according to Coca Cola’s website. Alas, right now you can only find it in Colombia, and there’s no word yet if Coke will introduce it in any other countries. But apparently it’s pretty popular so far — according to the site, beachside vendors have sold an average of 265 bottles per hour.

If you’re at least a marginally curious person, then perhaps you’re wondering how this works. Basically, these bottles are made of silicone molds filled with micro-filtered water, frozen to -13° F. Once you’ve drunk all the Coke, the bottle melts away. Oh, and each bottles come equipped with a rubber red band to make it easier to hold the vessel. The band then doubles as a bracelet. Bonus!

Coke is touting the environmentally friendly nature of these melt-away bottles, but as ABC News points out, they require so much extra refrigeration that it basically cancels out the eco-friendly aspect.

Well the article was a bit on the poorly written side and vague about the most obvious question...is the bottle edible? It says its made "of" a silicon mold. Did they mean of...or from? Generally it is not advisable to eat silicon.

Let's do a little back of the napkin. Soda-lime glass, the type commonly used for drink bottles has a melting point of about 815˚C, a density of 2.44 g/cm^3, and a specific heat of 879 J/kg/˚C. Water has a freezing point of 0˚C, a density of 1 g/cm^3, and a specific heat of 4184 J/kg/˚C.

Now, refrigeration is usually less efficient than heating, and you have to keep the bottle frozen until sale. We can assume that this is only going to be profitable in venues where the bottle can be expected to be sold in short order, so let's say it takes ten times the amount of energy to freeze and maintain the bottle before sale as it does to just freeze it. We're still at only 83 KJ.

This doesn't even take into account the fact that glass bottles also require waste collection and disposal or recycling, and it also doesn't even take into account the fact that the calculation assumes you are starting from glass stock in the first place, and not raw materials (silica, soda, lime, etc)

Some of these numbers are pulled out of thin air, (I didn't account for the energy of freezing—is that 80 calories/gram for water?) but I think these calculations show that the lifecycle might be less energy-intensive for the ice bottles. Certainly, it must be profitable, or Coca-Cola wouldn't do it, but the total lifecycle of a bottle doesn't end when Coca-Cola sells it. We have to account for the cost of potential injuries from glass bottles in public places, for one thing. And then, there's the second cycle of this: recycling the glass either requires re-melting it, or sorting and sterilising it, both of which are going to require more energy.

The only questions I have are: A. When can I have one? and 2. How do they keep the soda from freezing?! :D

That is only if the thermal energy that the bottle can 'suck' out of the coke is < than the energy it takes to freeze the coke.

water (and coke) take about 330 J / gm to freeze/melt - while ice is about 2.2 J/gm'C specific heat. That means that a -17 degree bottle, weighing about 300 gms (a ballpark estimate!) has about 11 kJ of cooling capacity (to help freeze the coke).

That bottle I described would be able to 'freeze' about 33 ml of coke before the entire structure reached 0'. So yes, a little bit of coke would 'freeze' (*note, not sure if there is enough sugar in coke to screw around with the freezing point!!!)

@SDRanger Does your glass of Coke freeze when you put ice in it? The mass of the liquid Coke is greater than the mass of the frozen ice. The Coke isnt put into the bottle until after its frozen, and its done on-site. The ice wont freeze the Coke; the Coke will melt the ice.

@highdef2012 I can't tell if you're trolling or not. If you are, well played. If you're not, you should tighten down your tinfoil hat, the librul lizard-men are coming to steal your guns and install CCTV cameras around your property.

@KirkBennett You don't really think that Coca-Cola is only made in the US, do you? Have you ever been outside this country? Coca-Cola is made locally all over the world. It may have been invented here, but Coca-Cola is a global company right now, and is probably avoiding US taxes like every other company that can afford to do so. So, spare us your false jingoism.

@punkakes13 Did you even bother to READ the article. If you had, you'd have noticed that the water is micro-filtered. That means it's possibly cleaner than most of the water you've been drinking all your life.

@punkakes13 Coca Cola is a company that has been around for more than 100 years they aren't giving anyone contaminated water they are much smarter than that. Their entire business is based around water.

@gcvsa@KirkBennett @gcvsa Spare us your opinions on someone else's opinion! Didn't your mother ever tell you that if you didn't have something nice to say, say nothing at all? Apparently you weren't taught that so grow up!

@HowardCihak@punkakes13 It may be micro-filtered, but the bottle can be contaminated from a 1000 different sources since you're literally eating the container. Workers at the plant, pests in the plant, distributors, stock boys at the grocery store, etc, etc. Not sure I'd trust it.

@HowardCihak@punkakes13 in all fairness.. certain countries you go to you get sick if you drink anywhere the local ice touches (being from the US and not being used to microbes in the water... always wipe the bottle down with a napkin).

so I wouldn't be licking the bottles anytime soon if they are stored in ice buckets with local ice water.